The Price of Forgetting
by Viking Princess
Summary: A long drabble from Christine's POV. There is an allure in letting the music carry you away, but there is also a price in forgetting...


_Author's Note: This is a long drabble type ficlet that fell from my mind entirely in one piece and insisted on being shared. The inspiration comes from the original novel by Gaston Leroux, and told in Christine's first person point of view. I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to review!_

**The Price of Forgetting**

To hear his voice was to lose sight of the world itself. Notes so painfully sweet could not fall from his rotting lips and so the mouth was transformed, budding sweet petals that shook dew in rainbow prism drops that fell to my ears unadulterated by the dark reality we stood in. The fingers that stroked such majesty from the keys were not parchment, yellowed skeletal remains but instead full and handsome, I daresay even inviting. His dramatic voice weaved between the notes, above, below and through them until I closed my eyes and could feel my earthbound body take flight with them, an intoxicating faintness that I dared not wake from.

And my voice rang of its own accord, a full octave above him and opened the sky to let him fly with me. The ecstasy – I can scarcely describe it. No other feeling could compare so I dare not set it beside another. No longer were we two bruised souls singing in the cellar nearest to hell; no, we were fearless angels no longer at the mercy of Earth's limitations.

His soul flew with mine; the voice of my Angel of Music elevated its host until he impetuously stood and discontinued playing the piano at which he sat. But rather than end the illusion it only heightened it, severing completely our voices from our bodies so that the grand silence served to lift us to a world no longer our own. We filled the emptiness, striking boldly darkness out of the darkness until the shadows were weak scraps that fled the boisterous light of our notes as they chased one another through the air. Our voices played thus, that they could run and crawl and intertwine with a heat that flushed my cheeks and cast Erik in the pallor nearer to life.

And we formed our inconsequential bodies around the play of our words, the ache of the air increasing around us, friction forming in fingers that nearly touched but did not, of lips that kissed with air between them. We stood facing one another, Erik and me, and embraced through the notes of the song.

Such was the effect of his voice upon me. Needless to say I was quite lost within it, a willing accomplice so to speak. More than willing. To reveal more I dare not, but the memory of the ecstasy in that moment serves to explain what happened next.

When alone in my thoughts; when considering the touch of this man, my brain registered only repugnance. My skin would crawl at the memory of his cold, clammy hands on my skin. Yet somehow, strangely with him advancing toward me then I felt none of these things. His eyes bore into mine, his breath seemed to match my own. When his fingers brushed ever so lightly over my cheek, my eyes simply closed of their own accord, and my face leaned into his hand. When his arm snaked around my waist I did not struggle, while his other hand wound itself into my long hair. As he cradled my neck and brought his lips to mine, I only remember thinking _yes._ Everything within me seemed to long for this.

His touch was cold, but his kiss was searing. His kiss, with the taste of anguish and frustration behind it, seemed to be consuming me from the outside in, burning the flesh away to my soul's core. It wasn't until my hand strayed to his face and met cold enameled porcelain that I realized fully what was happening.

The music's echo scurried off into the dark, giggling in its deceit.

I pulled away and he let me go. "I…" I stammered, "I…no…oh, Erik, what…" I retreated several steps back and stopped.

Erik answered my incomprehensible babble with a sigh. With a long, cold forefinger he traced his lower lip. Another sigh. "Christine, thank you for that, that tremendous gift. Your lips are like touching the face of God." I stood paralyzed, surely with a look of surprise and vague panic. He looked at me another long moment, then asked, "Christine?"

I wanted to scrub my lips with the back of my hand, but I dared not. Instead, I balled my fists in my skirts. "You, you tricked me," is all I managed to get out over the huge lump of tears in my throat. As hard as I fought not to cry, I lost, and a tear sprung from my eye and traced lazily down my cheek. Erik followed it with his eyes.

"How did I trick you?" he whispered.

"I don't know!" I exclaimed vehemently, my sudden anger releasing even more tears down my face. "It was your words, or, or your voice! I don't know! You sang, and I forgot…" I trailed off, gulping for air.

Erik's shoulders stooped slightly. "Forgot what," came more as a monotone inevitability than a question.

Hugging my arms, I sobbed, "Everything!"

He studied me a moment, then advanced hesitantly.

"No!" I gasped, throwing a hand up. He paused immediately, hands up in a gesture of innocence. He reached carefully into his pocket and produced a fine linen handkerchief, which he offered me at full arm's length. I took it and dabbed at my drowned face, hiccuping still with tears. With his head hanging he retreated to a side table and poured a splash of brandy, offering it to me at the same arm's length distance. I also accepted this and took a foolish gulp. It burned like fire, but it shocked me sufficiently to stop my tears and childish hiccups.

"Please Christine," Erik said, gesturing to matching armchairs in front of the grate, "please sit down. You're overcome. I don't want you to hurt yourself." When I didn't move, he added, "I won't sit there, with you. No, I'll sit in the corner. Here." He backed all the way to the far corner where a little used high back chair sat against the wall.

Finally I did cross to sit by the fire and tried in vain to dry my face, making sure to sit in the chair facing Erik's corner. I couldn't meet his eyes, however. His corner positively radiated despair, and I was the cause. After all, a kiss from me was all he had wanted, and I had ruined it with my reaction. And why had I reacted so badly? I dabbed at my eyes with the handkerchief Erik had given me, and then spread it over my lap to smooth and fold it. Only then did I recognize it.

Startled, I looked up at him. "This is mine?"

"Yes, he admitted, clasping his hands between his knees. "A practice I started early on. You had left it on your dressing room table after a lesson. You had cried at that lesson, cried tears of joy as you sang, and I cried as well. Your voice…" His voice trailed off. I needed no further explanation, for I remembered that lesson. My emotions had simply overcome me as I sang, and as I sang the tears had sprung and coursed. "You had held it in your hand, soaked in your lovely tears, and it smelled of your perfume. I could think of nothing better to keep you with me when I could not follow you. I keep it with me always. To comfort me."

I could think of nothing to say to this. Instead I looked into the fire.

"It is death to me to see you cry," he anguished quietly. "And yet tears do not make you ugly as they do to others. Even your tears are heavenly." I did look to him at this, but still kept silent. He sat nearly in darkness, his eyes searching mine from behind the mask.

I suddenly felt a dark, frustrated bubble of thought rising to the surface. "You wish for me not to cry?" I whispered, baiting the hook.

"Never tears of sadness, my angel. Tears are not completely evil. When you sang at that lesson, when you sing on the stage, I cry tears of pure longing and joy. Longing for the heaven your voice promises."

"And yet these tears are of sadness."

"Christine, you are not alone in your tears. If I were to remove my mask…" I must have reacted to this, for he continued, "No! Don't be alarmed. I shall not, but were I to, you would see the deformed brothers to your tears on my face, such as I have. What I received in joy you gave in sorrow, and my heart scarcely beats for the pain of it."

"Yet my tears must be of sorrow!" I suddenly flared, letting that ebony bubble of repressed anger break on the surface. "You tear me in two! You turn things around, I know not how, until I don't know what is right, what to do or think.

"You tell me this is all for me," I continued, well beyond the ability to edit myself or stop, "but I don't belong here! I belong in the light, in the world, and you're making me choose, and I cannot choose this!" All of this had fallen from me in one frantic breath, and the last words seem to ring and echo in the room. I froze, not even breathing, and Erik seemed equally paralyzed with shock at my violent outburst. In a pathetic attempt to break this unspeakable moment I choked out, "Don't you see? It's unnatural." I cursed myself for the stupidity to even bother opening my mouth again, since I obviously no longer had control of what issued forth from it.

"Yes, quite."

The words were clipped, succinct, and the last thing I expected to hear. I eyed Erik warily, waiting for the worst. I don't know what I expected, but that response had not been it. He sat very still. "Yes. Very unnatural. You are quite right." Was I hearing this correctly?

"Who lives underground?" he continued, slightly louder, as my dread slowly increased. "Who would choose that existence?" He stood very suddenly, and I could not help but flinch. "Not I!" he exclaimed. "No, indeed not! No, the choice was made for me. By whom? By whom, do you ask? By the human race!" He punctuated with a wild gesture to encompass the ceiling above us. He had begun pacing from wall to wall on his side of the room. "Yes, all the human race, who deemed my face unworthy for sunlight to fall upon it! For anything but darkness and contempt to fall upon it!"

Suddenly he flung himself forward and collapsed at my feet. I cringed and pressed into the back of the chair. A loud sob escaped him, raw and racking. "Christine, don't you see?" and at this the mask looked up from the floor. "I would never ask you to choose the darkness. Never that. You are everything pure and light and good." His white hand reached out tremulously and touched the hem of my skirts. "No, my angel, no, I want…" and he choked on his sobs. Sliding to his knees, he pressed his lips fervently to the exposed tip of my shoe. "Christine," he wrenched out, "I want you to choose me."

Frozen, I watched as Erik curled into a ball right there at my feet, on the rug before the fire. He curled into himself as would a wounded animal, or a child in pain. He gasped and choked on his own tears behind the mask, shaking with emotion. My heart was positively breaking, and yet strangely I could do nothing, and remained frozen, unable to move or speak. Of any retaliation I had expected or feared, it had not been this.

"Christine," he gasped from the floor, "Christine look away. I can't breathe. I must remove my mask. I must. Look away…" and his poor shaking fingers fumbled with the fastenings.

This simple act of helplessness seemed to break the spell upon me and I slid from my chair to the floor behind him. I reached out and began to loose the fastenings of the mask. Facing away, I felt him start with surprise, but he did not spurn my help, and I removed the mask and set it on the floor beside him. He kept his face turned resolutely away, and I made no attempt to touch him again. At this distance I could see the trembling as he fought to control his emotions. Reaching carefully around him, I timidly offered him the handkerchief he had given me earlier, and he took it, pressing it to his face for a long while. There we sat, on the floor before the fire, side by side with his face and torso turned away.

After a while, he calmed. "Don't you see?" he whispered laboriously. "Christine, I want you to save me from the darkness. I want to live in the light."

And suddenly I did see. Erik's light was not merely solar. He meant me.

I don't know how long we sat this way. There was a strange, numb peace in it, and the fire was nearly dead before I roused myself to stumble off to my room, leaving Erik sleeping on the rug with my shawl over his shoulders. I collapsed onto the bed Erik gave me fully clothed. There was a lightness of mind to have said these things to each other, as horrible as it had been at the time. For a small time the terrible knot of anxiety in my stomach had eased.

All the while I had sat by his side there in the parlor, I had thought with a strange detachment – with new eyes, or so I liked to fancy it. I had it all wrong when it came to Erik, or so I liked to believe. He was completely incapable of functioning in the world without my assistance. Without me, I mused, he would continue this beastly existence till an early death claimed him. With my aide, he could rejoin the human race that lived on the surface, in the sunlight. All that this required was my acceptance of his ghastly countenance, and to forever give up Raoul. The childish part of my mind shied away from both of these requirements.

After all, was Raoul not the very definition of my childhood? In my mind he represented every part of my early life. He was my first true friend, my first true kiss. He shared my memories of my blessed father, and knew the stories I lived on. How does one cut such a figure from their life? He was memory embodied!

And in the darkest corner of my mind, I must admit there still existed a deep-seated horror of Erik's appearance, a horror difficult to overcome. I had never seen skin so dead looking and translucent, never seen eyes that particular color of yellow. And the head itself was a death's head surely – a rotten growth leeching strength from an otherwise sound body. Hair could not even grow on something so disfigured. And while I shied away from the very notion, I knew in my heart I would feel shame to point him out to another and say, "Yes, that is Erik, my husband." And that shame filled me with a self-loathing uglier than he could ever be.

But why ever marry? My mind feverishly asked. He needs only a mentor, a friend to help him to the world. Why need you ever be married to him? But I knew the answer as surely as I knew my name. Erik could never be satisfied with me in his life and not have me completely. His love was complete and overpowering, a life sustaining thing to him now. To be without it, to see the object and not possess it would be too much for him. And suddenly a bubble of laughter rose up in me and burst into nearly hysterical giggles, for I realized that while I had been pondering the possibility of marrying this man I did not even know his last name!

I rolled onto my side and let my heavy eyes close. I did not know if it was day or night, but I knew I was exhausted, and that was enough.


End file.
